Author: Brian Bowers
Publisher: Peter Peregrinus Limited
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Author: Ernest Freeberg
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143124447
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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A sweeping history of the electric light revolution and the birth of modern America The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but more than any other invention, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb marked the arrival of modernity, transforming its inventor into a mythic figure and avatar of an era. In The Age of Edison, award-winning author and historian Ernest Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it and capturing the wonder Edison’s invention inspired. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility in which the greater forces of progress and change are made by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.

Author: Sandy Isenstadt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026203817X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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How electric light created new spaces that transformed the built environment and the perception of modern architecture. In this book, Sandy Isenstadt examines electric light as a form of architecture—as a new, uniquely modern kind of building material. Electric light was more than just a novel way of brightening a room or illuminating a streetscape; it brought with it new ways of perceiving and experiencing space itself. If modernity can be characterized by rapid, incessant change, and modernism as the creative response to such change, Isenstadt argues, then electricity—instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous, evanescent—is modernity's medium. Isenstadt shows how the introduction of electric lighting at the end of the nineteenth century created new architectural spaces that altered and sometimes eclipsed previously existing spaces. He constructs an architectural history of these new spaces through five examples, ranging from the tangible miracle of the light switch to the immaterial and borderless gloom of the wartime blackout. He describes what it means when an ordinary person can play God by flipping a switch; when the roving cone of automobile headlights places driver and passenger at the vertex of a luminous cavity; when lighting in factories is seen to enhance productivity; when Times Square became an emblem of illuminated commercial speech; and when the absence of electric light in a blackout produced a new type of space. In this book, the first sustained examination of the spatial effects of electric lighting, Isenstadt reconceives modernism in architecture to account for the new perceptual conditions and visual habits that followed widespread electrification.

Author: Robert Friedel
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801899443
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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In September 1878, Thomas Alva Edison brashly—and prematurely—proclaimed his breakthrough invention of a workable electric light. That announcement was followed by many months of intense experimentation that led to the successful completion of his Pearl Street station four years later. Edison was not alone—nor was he first—in developing an incandescent light bulb, but his was the most successful of all competing inventions. Drawing from the documents in the Edison archives, Robert Friedel and Paul Israel explain how this came to be. They explore the process of invention through the Menlo Park notes, discussing the full range of experiments, including the testing of a host of materials, the development of such crucial tools as the world's best vacuum pump, and the construction of the first large-scale electrical generators and power distribution systems. The result is a fascinating story of excitement, risk, and competition. Revised and updated from the original 1986 edition, this definitive study of the most famous invention of America's most famous inventor is completely keyed to the printed and electronic versions of the Edison Papers, inviting the reader to explore further the remarkable original sources.

Author: Edison Electric Light Company
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electric lighting, Incandescent
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Author: Adam Allerhand
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN: 9789811227059
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Following the critically acclaimed An Illustrated History of Electric Lighting (2016), Professor Emeritus Adam Allerhand of Indiana University, USA, is back with yet another masterpiece. Starting from 1300 BC and progressing steadily to the present, this book is the ultimate guide to the history of the science of electricity. It is the result of 15 years of research through a vast and daunting literature which is hard for beginners and experts alike to navigate, bringing together many widely scattered and obscure facts that have hitherto eluded even the most ardent aficionados. There is particular emphasis on practical applications, including electricity for illumination, communication, medicine and industry. For non-specialists with an interest in the subject, fret not, for the text is written with a minimum of technical jargon, and is richly illustrated with over 100 images, many of them created by the author.

Author: Brian Bowers
Publisher: Peter Peregrinus Limited
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Author: Jill Jonnes
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0375758844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.

Author: Mark Essig
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802777104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Describes how Thomas Edison, an avowed opponent of the death penalty, became the creator of the electric chair, offering a look at the social, cultural, economic, and political factors involved in the invention.

Author: Benjamin Franklin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electric power
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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